When Grozny comes to Fallujah (scorched earth of Senator John Kerry's )

Do not be surprised to see three or four divisions of the Russian army in the Sunni triangle before year-end, with an announcement just prior to the US presidential election in November. Long rumored (or under negotiation), a Russian deployment of 40,000 soldiers was predicted on July 16 by the US intelligence site www.stratfor.com, and denied by the Russian Foreign Ministry on July 20. Nonetheless, the logic is compelling. Russian support for US occupation forces would make scorched earth of Senator John Kerry's attack on the Bush administration's foreign policy, namely its failure to form effective alliances. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the chance to make scorched earth of Fallujah is even more tempting.

In exchange for a troop presence in Iraq, Russia would obtain a free hand in dealings with the countries of the former Soviet Union. It would gain leverage against a weakening Turkey in the Caucasus and Central Asia. And it would vastly enhance its leverage in negotiations over the placement of oil pipelines. Most important, perhaps, it would assert its old status as a global military power against the feckless Europeans. In short, the arrangement would benefit everyone, except of course the population of Fallujah.

America's squeamishness in the face of large-scale civilian casualties mystifies the Russians, who know about such things. The remnants of the Chechen resistance have few friends, even among Arab governments. The General Assembly of the United Nations remained mute over the Chechen dead when Russia razed Grozny in 1999, killing or displacing about half of the population of 1 million. The Council of Europe, responsible for investigating human rights violations, suspended activity in Chechnya last year by agreement with Moscow. In January, the Saudis received the pro-Russian president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, who told alJazeera, "I think the most important factor is that Prince Abd Allah invited the leaders of the Chechen Republic. This is a definite recognition of the current authorities [being] friendly to Moscow."

Israel's apologists claim that world silence about Chechnya betrays the hypocrisy of a world community that marshals the General Assembly against the minor inconvenience of its defensive wall, but bites its tongue before the mass destruction of Muslim life. Islam, however, does not count lives the same way. More important than life itself is the integrity of Islam's promise. A re-established Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital on territory won from the former Dar al-Islam subverts Islam's promise, namely that it will supercede the false teachings of Christian and Jew. That is a humiliation that transcends the Muslim pain threshold, a dishonor too great to bear (see Horror and humiliation in Fallujah, April 27). By contrast, no Muslim expects an Islamic state to stand up to a power like Russia, even in its senescence.

President George W Bush has mis-defined the mission of US forces to the point that a deus ex machina (god from the machine) offers the best way out. "We did not come here to fight these people, we came here to free them," the commander of the 1st Marine Division told his men after withdrawing from Fallujah in May, the New York Times reported May 11. If the marines do not fight them, however, somebody will have to. In a recent series, Asia Times Online correspondent Nir Rosen reported on the surge in Islamist morale attendant on the US retreat. There are only two ways to reduce irregular forces that use the local civilian population as a shield. With sufficiently precise intelligence, the Israelis have shown, it is possible to kill off a sufficient number of leadership cadres to render the opposition ineffective. Poor intelligence capacity eliminates that option in Iraq (Why America is losing the intelligence war, November 11, 2003). The other option is to pursue the enemy regardless of the cost in civilian lives. Never have American ground forces done this. It is one thing to annihilate Tokyo or Dresden from the air, and another to direct artillery fire at civilian neighborhoods, as did the Russians in Grozny. For Americans, the horror of such encounters is overwhelming.

Deploying proxy forces who lack this kind of compunction is the obvious solution. Earlier I guessed (wrongly) that Washington would avail itself of the 75,000-strong Kurdish militias - peshmergas - to subdue the Sunni triangle. Turning the matter over to the Russians would be a masterstroke. If the United States takes Russia on as a partner in Iraq, as I predict, a profound change will ensue in US policy toward the Muslim world. Both the Bill Clinton and Bush administrations staked a great deal on support for Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, by way of showing that the US was willing to bomb Christians in order to protect Muslims. In Russia's view, the US deliberately provoked war with Serbia. Clinton's special ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a likely secretary of state in a John Kerry administration, delivered an ultimatum to former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic at the February 1999 Rambouillet negotiations, with the intent of provoking war, in the universally held Slavic view.

The bombardment of Serbia, Washington hoped, would establish its bona fides among Muslims. "The terrorists we confront cannot deceive us by attempting to wrap themselves in Islam's glorious mantle. Islam's great leaders and scholars tell us otherwise. Our own history and experience tell us otherwise. We helped defend Muslims in Kuwait. We helped defend Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo," US Ambassador John Negroponte told the United Nations General Assembly on October 1, 2001. Serbia was a cheap sacrifice. Except for Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, no Serbian has won the attention of world culture in half a century. Andric's derogatory portrayal of Bosnian Muslims (written when Bosnia contributed a division to Germany's Waffen SS) proscribes him from polite company today. Devastated during both world wars and kept backward by communism, Serbia had no friends in the West, apart from a tiny emigre community, and poor capacity to tell its side of the story.

Whether one accepts the Slavic view of events or not, the Muslim world turned up its nose at the Clinton administration's attempt to buy its goodwill. The United States threatens the integrity of the Islamic world not by its policy, but by its nature; the creative destruction and cultural amnesia that define US society threaten to tear apart the sinews of traditional Islamic life. Along with Holbrooke and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Clinton's national security adviser Samuel R Berger crafted this gambit gone awry. Berger's present embarrassment about documents he allegedly stole from the National Archives may have nothing to do with the prospective Russian-US arrangement, but it may set the events of 1999 in a different context. Allegations already are circulating in the media that the Clinton administration arranged for Afghanistan-based jihadis to travel to Kosovo in the service of the Albanian cause. One should not take such rumors at face value, but they do suggest that the Clinton administration's accommodative stance toward the Muslim world may be subject to a nasty sort of dissection during the US presidential election.

SPENGLER
Why America is losing the intelligence war

"Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success," said President George W Bush on September 20, 2001.

Unique among America's foreign conflicts, the so-called "war on terror" is an intelligence war. That bodes ill for America, because an intelligence war is the kind America is least capable of fighting, for reasons inherent in the country's character. That is one more reason why Islamic radicalism yet may defeat the West.

It is already clear that America is losing the intelligence war in Iraq, for the same reasons it lost in Somalia. The rocket attack on the al-Rashid hotel while Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was present, the downing of a Chinook helicopter with 16 deaths, and related incidents suggest that the Iraqi resistance has infiltrated the American command. That should be no surprise, given that the occupiers depend on local sources for information, and have little capacity to distinguish a repentant Ba'athist from a saboteur. There exist ways to compensate for such limitations, to be sure, but an army that would court-martial Lieutenant-Colonel Allen West for scaring a prisoner into a confession with a harmless pistol shot does not have the stomach for them.

More disturbing for the American side are the treason charges against an army chaplain and translator at the Guantanamo prison for al-Qaeda captives. The situation brings to mind Kim Philby and the failure of Anglo-American intelligence in the 1930s, when the Soviet side wielded a higher moral authority among the intellectual class. Syrian intelligence, it appears, reached into one of America's most secure installations. That is quite a turnabout from the 1960s, when Israel's master spy Eli Cohen infiltrated the highest levels of the Syrian government.

Assigning blame for intelligence failures has become a minor industry in the United States. Gerald Posner's recent book Why America Slept (See the Asia Times Online review of September 17, Caught napping) prompted a new round of finger-pointing, all of which ignores the greater issue. A tragic flaw in the American character rather than preventible negligence accounts for systematic intelligence failure.

In the intelligence war, Islamists have a distinct advantage. Among the ranks of Islamist radicals are thousands who have studied in the United States, speak serviceable English, and can move with ease in American society. How many field agents of American intelligence can move at ease in the Islamist milieu? German and British universities once produced spies who could speak half a dozen Arab dialects and recite the Koran from memory. Today's only superpower cannot recruit enough Arabic translators to handle routine intercepts.

Precisely why the US cannot find Arabic translators (let alone Arabic-speaking field agents) deserves a moment's attention. Conservative critics of the American intelligence establishment, such as Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, ridicule the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) lack of language ability, and blame the previous (Democratic) administration for failing to spend enough money on the requisite skills.

All that is somewhat unfair. During the 1990s, the CIA under Admiral James Woolsey and then under George Tenet cast its net wide for speakers of foreign languages, particularly Middle Eastern and South Asian dialects, with disappointing results. The pool of qualified applicants was too small, and within this pool, too few applicants met the agency's security standards. Particularly in the case of Arabic and Persian, too many of the candidates were first and second generation immigrants who failed the screening criteria, that is, they were deemed too likely to sympathize with their subjects. The Guantanamo allegations suggest that the CIA's security concerns were not ill placed.

By contrast, Israeli intelligence can draw on a pool of first and second generation immigrants who speak foreign languages (among which Arabic is most common) as natives, but feel no loyalty whatever, but rather hostility, to their native culture. During the Cold War, European intelligence services could find native speakers of all varieties - German-speaking Bohemians from the Austrian Empire, Polish-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Poles, Italian-speaking Austrians - who despised the cultures in which they were educated and were happy to subvert them. The average Hungarian headwaiter had a greater command of languages than today's doctoral students in comparative literature at American universities.

In terms of linguistic and cultural capacity, the US today commands what may be the lowest-quality clandestine service of any great power in history. Why don't more Americans learn foreign languages? Turn the question around: why do they forget the languages they already know? The children of immigrants almost invariably lose the native language of their ancestors. One finds German festivals in Wisconsin with lederhosen-wearing brass bands, Weissbier and bratwurst, but no one who can form a single German sentence. Italian-Americans march through the streets in what they imagine to be native costume to honor the birthday of Columbus, without knowing more than a few obscenities in a southern dialect.

Folk came to America precisely in order to shed their culture. More precisely, they fled the tragic destiny of their cultures. Immigrants to America were the poor or the rebels. Not the Milanese but the Calabrians, not the Berliners but the Bavarians, not the assimilated Jews of Germany but the persecuted Jews of Russia made their way westward. These had little stake in their own cultures and no connection to the high culture of the countries they abandoned. There are a few exceptions, eg, the German political exiles of 1848, but these are few. What did the Irish immigrants care for Shakespeare, or Russian-Jewish immigrants for Leo Tolstoy? They shed their old culture almost as fast as their traveling-clothes.

America has little culture in the strict sense of the term. Culture - the transmittable experience of one's antecedents - is the stuff from which we weave the illusion of immortality. In the Old World one could not separate religion and culture. Myths of national origin, poetry and song, cuisine and geography fused into a shared experience of those who went before, with those who come after. Culture means existential continuity.

What America offers, by contrast, is redemption through a new beginning, as closely as anyone is likely to get to a realization of the original Christian project. That is the subject of the Western, which passes as an American original but in fact stems from the 16th century chivalresque novel. It finds its highest expression in John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, the greatest American work of narrative art (ignoring that insufferable allegory Moby Dick and that poor-man's picaresque novel Huckleberry Finn.).

In Ford's film, a convict and a prostitute travel west, pass through danger and tests of character, and start a new life. That is why Americans do not know foreign languages. Rare is the American who learns a foreign language truly well. Those who do so fall in love with the strangeness of a foreign culture, like the adolescent who becomes infatuated with the streetwalker to whom he lost his virginity. Such people are of no use for intelligence work, for who can be trusted to subvert a culture he loves?

The quality of American intelligence depends on its moral authority to recruit spies who are willing to betray their own cultures because of their faith in America. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the credibility of the West stood at an ebb, Russia recruited intellectuals from the great universities of the West. Against the betrayal of its own elites, the West had no defense, and Russia won the intelligence war of the 1940s and 1950s. Not until the credibility of Russian communism collapsed after the 1956 Hungarian invasion did the tide turn, as Russians and Eastern Europeans shifted loyalty to the American side.

Today's intelligence war with radical Islam comes down to a contest for the loyalties of the population of individuals who can move between both worlds. The vast majority of these are university students from Islamic countries in the US or Western Europe, and the remainder are students of Oriental languages in the West. For several reasons, the US is at a vast disadvantage.

Unlike other immigrants, Muslim students in the US neither are poor nor politically disenfranchised. They are there precisely because they belong to the elite of their country, for whom foreign study is a privilege. Few are prepared to abandon their culture, while many resent the West. Because of the cultural divide, the vast majority of Muslims who study in the West read sciences or mathematics. Indian and Chinese foreign students dominate these faculties. No Arab has become a scientist of note since the early Middle Ages, while the universities are full of Indian and Chinese Nobelists. Hell hath no fury like an elite slighted. These circumstances tend to provoke the resentment of Arab and other Muslim foreign students toward the West.

Muslim students attending the most prestigious Western universities, moreover, hear nothing of the merits of Western culture. Instead, what they learn from post-colonial theory, deconstructionism, and post-modernism is that all culture is a pretext for the assertion of power by oppressors. No qualitative difference separates Dante and Goethe from the meanest screed of the cheapest propagandist. What matters is the sub-text, the expression of power relations buried beneath the rhetoric. They learn of the evil US that slaughtered its native population, oppressed blacks and other minorities, degraded women, marginalized the poor, and operates on behalf of plutocratic financial interests.

Not since Kim Philby was an undergraduate at Cambridge has the intellectual elite of the West been so inclined to bite the hand that feeds it. The degenerate view of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which reduces all faith and conviction to capricious existential choice, dominates the mind of the West. From this standpoint it is impossible to challenge another culture, because all differences are arbitrary to begin with. How is it possible under these circumstances to make ideological recruits?

There is not much hope for American intelligence among Western students of the Middle East. General John Abizaid, the commander of US Central Command, earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern Studies in 1981 under Professor Nadav Safran, one of the best academics in the field. But in 1985, the Middle East Studies Association censured Safran for accepting CIA funding, destroying his career, according to Martin Kramer, a right-wing critic of the overwhelmingly left-wing Middle East Studies establishment. That was a generation ago; in the interim, the field has shifted even further toward Heideggerian relativism.

One does encounter exceptions, such as General William Boykin, an evangelical Christian who evidently does not subscribe to the relativism of the academics and who heads the hunt for Osama bin Laden, among others. The evangelicals represent an important force in American politics, but have little to contribute to the intelligence effort. Born-again Christians in some respects seem as if they were born yesterday. Their educational institutions, such as they are, lack the sophistication to produce the sort of training that General Abizaid received at Harvard when it was still available.

American intelligence cannot recruit reliable spies from the available pool of foreign nationals, nor can it train its own. Army Special Forces makes an effort to teach languages to its personnel, but anyone who has met these fresh-faced, well-meaning young people has the impression that they are much better in a gunfight than in a war of ideas. I expect more intelligence failures, more "why-America-slept" exposes, more Congressional committees debating who lost what, and more American casualties. One possible consequence of America's intelligence failures may be a far greater degree of dependency on Israel and India for human intelligence

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